


Of Ghosts and Graveyards

by Merkwerkee



Category: Void Jumpers (Web Series)
Genre: Dark Thoughts, Ghosts, Possession, s4 e1 The Haunting of Blight Manor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:53:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27645091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merkwerkee/pseuds/Merkwerkee
Summary: Tag tries to catch a couple winks before the gang goes out to investigate the very-definitely-haunted Blight Manor, but doesn't quite manage it. First his own brain won't let him sleep, then the actual ghosts get in on the action. Oh my!
Kudos: 1





	Of Ghosts and Graveyards

Tag couldn’t say he’d really been expecting to get a good night’s sleep; for one, he’d been having nightmares more often recently about…about things, and for two the house made like, a lot of noise. He’d gotten used to the soft thrum of the engines on Haven, the noise the air recirculators made as they kept things at a livable temperature, but this house creaked at every step, and sometimes even when people weren’t stepping. There was an eerie moan every now and again, which was weird because there hadn’t been much wind outside, and things skittered in the walls.

All that, plus the fact that the plan currently was to sneak downstairs to the basement once they were sure the whole Manor was asleep. That definitely contributed to his low expectations of getting some sleep in this strange room. Even so, as he lay completely still on the mattress - no rolling around tonight, no restless muscle twitches or random fidgeting, almost completely unlike his usual sleeping experience - the thoughts that rolled through his head were surprisingly dark as sleep eluded him.

The graveyard they’d come through on their way to the Manor…The headstones had all been in poor condition, stained by decades of swamp water and their inscriptions eroded into unreadability, and for some reason that struck a chord in Tag. He’d never really thought about death before - well, his own death anyway. People died, and that was natural, but they had all been much older than he had supposed himself to be and it had just never occurred to him to think about it. But then Bryn had died, and - and he’d _felt_ it, through their bond, had been _right there_ with her when her heart stopped.

That had honestly been the subject of not a few nightmares since, but combined with the imagery of that decaying graveyard…What would happen to _him_ , when he died? Half-dad had said that he would be scattered, that they would have to gather him up before they could send him back again, but that was - that wasn’t him, not really. That was this Otherness, inside of him. What would happen to the _human_ Tag, when this shell finally expired? Would he be remembered? Mourned? Would he end up buried in the clammy soil of a planet that had never been his home, with a clean white headstone to mark him? That would slowly forget about him as surely as the markers in the graveyard had forgotten what lay buried beneath them?

Or would he simply burn up and fade away? Would the human known as Tag be made to dust as surely as he’d been made from it? Half-dad had said they’d tried raising him in the human world before, and he sometimes got little flashes of things he couldn’t name but - he couldn’t remember them, the other people he’d been in the past. Not really. He didn’t know their names, where they’d lived, what they’d done with their lives - how they’d managed to refuse giving in to the same darkness that lurked beside his bones. He didn’t know their favorite foods or colors, the people they’d loved and the people who’d loved them - all of it gone, trapped in the inky darkness of the Malice.

_Would the same thing happen to him?_

If it hadn’t been for the amulet, keeping him grounded and in tune with his physical body, Tag would probably have never noticed the temperature dropping. Even with the amulet, it wasn’t enough to pull him out of the mire of his thoughts until his breath puffed into visibility above his face in the wan bit of full moon’s light that made it in through the clouded window. That was enough to draw him closer to the waking world, and the very faint sounds of…music? Some kind of threnody that wound its way around the very edge of hearing, notes tinkling like they were being plucked from something metallic while the tune itself set the hairs at the back of his neck prickling with recognition even if his conscious mind couldn’t name it.

_At the very edge of his vision, something moved._

Tag spun, dropping into a fighting stance he scarcely recognized. His every nerve was screaming with tension, but…there was nothing. A blank wall greeted his questing eyes, covered in ancient, peeling wallpaper with a pattern on it that felt like it might have once been festive and fashionable when it was newly-placed. The longer he looked, though, the more there seemed to be something wrong with the pattern - he couldn’t be sure if it was changing right before his eyes, or if the shifting moonlight was revealing what the pattern really was.

Fascinated, Tag slowly rose from the bed and walked over to the wall. With the silver moon lighting the way through the smokey glass of the windowpane and the clouds of his own breath fogging the way in front of him, the three steps to the wall felt very much like a dream. Or some kind of magical experience, at least; with the amulet on, that magic drowned out nearly everything else. It filled his senses with a kind of background hum that made it much more difficult to feel anything beyond it, so he could not truly say if there was other magic in the room or not.

On reaching the wall, he reached out his hand and slowly began running it down one of the more intact sections of wallpaper. It was smooth and cool to the touch - and perhaps the slightest bit damp? - but more importantly, standing here made it extremely obvious that the music was coming elsewhere in the room. He glanced over his shoulder, but the light of the moon concealed far more than it revealed. It lay across his bed in a cool slice of silver, but the darkness beyond it was absolute and defied his eyes to pierce it.

His hand ran across a rough patch in the wall.

He turned his attention back to it immediately, dismissing the soft threnody as something to look into later as he focus on the rough area his fingers had found. Tag squinted, leaning in closer - had someone carved something into the wood? It looked like words, though they were difficult to make out in the soft moonlight.

 _A Parallel’s oath_  
is  
 **Forever**.

Ice tied a knot in Tag’s insides as he made out the last word, but he didn’t have time to dwell on them as the wallpaper _deformed_. He twitched backward in surprise as the face pushed further, now joined by a pair of hands as something - someone - tried desperately to fight their way free of that strange wallpaper. Maybe it was the moonlight, maybe it was the dark thoughts he’d been having as he lay in the bed, but the figure looked almost…sad, in a way. It was trapped behind some kind of barrier, clawing desperately for freedom and for some strange reason the look on its face made him think of the anguish on Sam’s when he’d shot the man with the Void blaster back in Bryn’s throne room.

His heart went out for it, and he reached forward to grasp and help it out of the barrier. He pulled, and pulled, and the wallpaper stretched like well-worked bread dough before finally reaching a snapping point. The look on the thing’s face seemed almost surprised, but it didn’t resist his grip and when the snap came it barreled forward towards freedom, knocking him back into a small table that seemed to serve no purpose except to hold a particularly ugly ceramic statuette. Neither object was designed to hold the weight of even a skinny parallel, and Tag fell into a heap of splintered wood and sharp, grey shards as the thing from the wallpaper flew through him to the other side of the room.

Tag lay there for a few moments, winded, before he twisted to look at the being he’d pulled from the wall. It was tall, taller than him if he’d been standing up but definitely taller than him while he was lying down. It looked mostly human, but the arms and legs were a little long in a way that didn’t seem natural - had its bones been pulled out of socket? If it had had bones. That had probably hurt a lot. The head bigger than he was used to, as well, but not too much bigger than Figmot’s. In fact, it reminded him a lot of Figmot, from the breadth of its shoulders to the shape of its hands. The way it moved, too - it was moving from shadow to shadow around him, almost like it was afraid of the moonlight Tag was currently bathed in, but it moved with the same solid step Figmot had used while escorting them to their rooms.

He couldn’t not reach out. “Hey, hey, big, uh, ghost. Um, I don’t - I don’t know what’s going on in you ghost brain, and if I say ‘Figmot’ I don’t know if you know, intellectually, who that is, but I think you know in - forgive me - but your blood and your bones who that is. You have people here, on this planet right now, and they’re suffering and we’re not here to make that worse, we are here to help them. If you can hear me, I just wanna, I just want to appeal to that last bit of a human that I think is - that I believe is inside of you.”

The ghost slowed as Tag spoke, pausing for several long moments in silence as he finished his entreaty. The door crashed open under the might of Rex as the silence stretched, but neither Tag nor the ghost could spare any attention from each other. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, the ghost held its hands out as if in supplication.

_“̵T̵h̸e̴ ̴n̵a̴m̸e̶ ̷F̷i̷g̷m̴o̶t̸ ̷r̸i̷n̷g̴s̷ ̴a̶ ̴b̶e̵l̶l̵.̷ ̴B̵u̶t̴ ̸t̸h̵e̷ ̴m̴e̵m̴o̶r̵y̷ ̶i̷s̸ ̵s̵o̷ ̸f̴a̶r̴ ̸a̸w̷a̴y̸.̸ ̸P̴e̵r̴h̶a̴p̵s̷,̷ ̶I̴ ̷c̴o̷u̸l̴d̵ ̷l̸o̴o̴k̴ ̶i̸n̸t̶o̷ ̶y̵o̷u̸r̶s̶?̵"̸_

Tag knew the pain of lost memories, the aching distance that it was to forget - though he truly didn’t know how much he’d forgotten. He hesitated for only a single instant, before nodding to the specter before him.

"Yeah. Yeah, of course.”

The ghost didn’t hesitate. As soon as Tag acquiesced, it floated towards him and -

 _There wasn’t enough room_. That was Tag’s first thought. The Other that was Tag had folded, contorted, bent, spindled, and mutilated itself to fit into a measly three-dimensional human shell; on a good day, the fit wasn’t perfect and on a bad one it threatened to overspill its boundaries altogether but this - this was something else. The ghost was a human soul - at its core, anyway. That tiny mote of light was swaddled in layers and layers of necromancy, representing centuries of necromancers who had commanded and used it, and those layers oozed in to fill the disjoined, hair-fine distances that lay between the Other and the human it existed in.

The magic of the amulet kept Tag vividly aware of his own body and the world around him, yet at the same moment he could hear, see, and feel nothing but the ghost. It reached for his memories, the layers of necromantic magic oozing between roils of Malice and corruption, but - it was looking in the wrong place. Tag only looked human; the Other that resided inside his skin kept his memories in the embrace of its darkness, and he could feel the spirit’s frustration and fear as it looked in vain through the roils in his mind. So Tag did the only thing he could think to do - he reached out and touched the spirit’s memories.

Instantly, he was in the far, far past. A figure stood before him - a woman, wearing Summoner’s robes emblazoned with the Blight sigil. “F̶̢̧̡̢̢̛̘̟̞̩̭͓̰̤̲̫̟̜͔͕̞̘̅̅͑̋̂͆̈́̀͊̑͜͠į̵̨̧̢̧̣̥̻̟̩̞͈̠̠̝̦̜̯̀̓̆̿̌ṋ̸̖͖̗̠̳͙̪̙̱̙̼̺͂̀̽͐̂͐͆͛͊̚͘͠͝b̵̡̨̨͔͙̩̭̺̗̰̜̩̟͔̠̺̤̘̮͈͉͂̈́ͅͅȃ̴̡̡̧̨̡͍̲̹̻͙̘̰̯͙͇̩̯ͅc̵̥͎͇͙̦̺̭̘̥̒̃͒̍̃̉̂̌͆͑̎̈͋̀̓̉̓͘͜͝h̴̨̧̧̺̩̦̘̘̭̪̘̥̖̝͙̞̹̑̈́̾͠ͅ.” she said, looking up at him. “Ḩ̸̢̧̢̛̜̳̞̱͍̟͍̳̞̺̜̯͇͈̖̗̯̝̬͉͈̉͗̒̋͑̊̄̇̕͜ͅͅē̸̢̩͙͓͕̞͎͓͇̭̩̲̯͓̜͈̝̩͍͈̜͈͕̼̖̩̘ͅl̶̙̱͉͛̅͌̏̃̒̇̂̈̎̎̄͑͆̕͘p̷̢̻̰̺̰̲̞̘̮̮̓͊̔͒̚͜ ̴̨̨̡̹̥̞͇͕̩̠̹̻͈̬̱̭̝̦̬̞̹͓̈̌̈̂̅̆̾̐̔̅̇͘̕͜m̴̢̨̧̘̺̱̱̠͖̦̹͙͕̮͕̮̹̤̭̰̤͓͎̝̺̝͍̓͌̓͌̓͊̇͒̀̓͗̃̓̒͛̿́͐̀̄̎́̽̓͝e̷̡͚͕̾͐̾ ̵̛̲̽̌́̑̾̚͝͠͠ẘ̸̨̫̯̣͔͎̹̖̲̪̼͉͚̳͓̹̱̟̙͉̪̠̙̭̦̼̝͛̅̆̑̈́͒̏̈͗̆͛̅̄ỉ̷̛͍̹̥͈͈̤͒͂̄̑͛͘t̷͖͙̪̟̮̣̻̝̜̆̎͊̔̈́͠ḩ̶̨̛̣͓͕͇̗̼̬̱̺̩̣̙̲̞͉̥̮͍̖̰̻͙̤̱̎͌͑͋͐̌̈́̃͗̐̋̈́̈́͊̂̋́͛̚͠ͅ ̵̢̥̙͎̻̠̙͓̫͕̪̩̺̝͎̮̯̯̪͚̲͎͓̗̣̰̩͊̂̽͜ṫ̸̻̱͙͖̣̭͓̥͚̳̥͙̤̯̤͙͔̘̜̠̗͋̃͆̈́͆̓̒͛͛͘͘̕̕͜͠h̵̢̺̭̼̼̩̹̝͕̲̰̜̲̅̈́̑̍̔̐͆͑͐̽͑̉̈͑́̃͝ͅị̴̛̄̂͛̿̿͂̾̋͆͘̚͠s̶̨͆̀̿͐̃̔̈̏̐͛̄͊̽̒͐̓̾̏̓̋̚,̷̟̳͎̮̞̬̝̩͂̃͂̊͋̐̕̚̕͠ ̶̨̛̞͕̦̮͕͖̞̳̫͎̈́͊̒̿͗͑̃̈̂̀͐̂w̷͚̬͈͈͎̦̻͓̆̅̐͊̒̌́̈̂̉̿̑̏̚̚̕͜͝i̴͚̯̤̍̒̇̎͐̔̈́̃͛͑̈́͐̎͛̾̊̆̀̍͘͘ḽ̵̛͉͓̝͐̆͒͌̂̓̋̈́͘͝l̸̨͖͇͙̖͌͋͛͛̾̑̓̑̌͜͝ͅ ̶̛̩̱̱͒̅̆̎͒̄͒̋̀̅͒͒̀̇͊͋̕y̷̧̢̨̞̯̩̦͔͍̮̪̯͍͍̟̼̬̟̝̥̥̑͊̂̈̾̇̃͂͋͂͊̃́͌͐͝ͅo̶̧̢̰͙͇̬̥̖̥̣̗̪͚̜͇̥͕̙̐̀͆̿̍̏́͜u̷̢̧͙̙̲̣͇͔̙̦̫̾̈́͒̾̇̄̌̒͗̐̚͘?̶̛̰̯̱͇̇̋̎̎͛̌̈́̾͒̍̿̅́̐̓̕̚͠͝”

He bowed and walked away. More flashes followed - the woman in Summoner robes featured many times, a place that might have been a castle, green fields, emerald swamps, pale but otherwise healthy men raising their mugs in toast and then - darkness, pain, a dungeon, the woman again, she was smiling and hurt, hurt with a pain that could kill him - she -

Tag pulled away from the memories, vaguely aware that his mouth was moving and that he wasn’t the one moving it, but he couldn’t focus on that. _A Parallel stays with their Summoner until the Summoner dies, or until the Summoner sends them away. The Parallel cannot reject the Summoner_ , said a stray fragment of memory - he couldn’t say for sure if it was his or F̶̢̧̡̢̢̛̘̟̞̩̭͓̰̤̲̫̟̜͔͕̞̘̅̅͑̋̂͆̈́̀͊̑͜͠į̵̨̧̢̧̣̥̻̟̩̞͈̠̠̝̦̜̯̀̓̆̿̌ṋ̸̖͖̗̠̳͙̪̙̱̙̼̺͂̀̽͐̂͐͆͛͊̚͘͠͝b̵̡̨̨͔͙̩̭̺̗̰̜̩̟͔̠̺̤̘̮͈͉͂̈́ͅͅȃ̴̡̡̧̨̡͍̲̹̻͙̘̰̯͙͇̩̯ͅc̵̥͎͇͙̦̺̭̘̥̒̃͒̍̃̉̂̌͆͑̎̈͋̀̓̉̓͘͜͝h̴̨̧̧̺̩̦̘̘̭̪̘̥̖̝͙̞̹̑̈́̾͠ͅ’s. The ghost had been - had been a Parallel, to a previous Blight Summoner, one who had taken to necromancy long before the current day, and she’d - she’d -

The memory of the rack, the pain as it pulled his joints apart, the sound of the Summoner laughing as screams echoed - he pushed it _away_ violently, back towards its source, and the ghost in his body shrank as a touch of Malice went along with the memory. Tag cast about for something, desperate for anything to take his mind off what he’d seen; the pain in his fingers caught his attention, and he only had a split second to realize the creeping necromancy that had oozed off the spirit in his body was a geas, one that forced it to attack anyone its master told it to - and that geas was in him now and -

Tag attacked the spirit’s control without a second thought, pulling his physical aim away and off true, and putting the arrow into the boards beside Puq’s head. Inside, he _shoved_ at the spirit - at F̶̢̧̡̢̢̛̘̟̞̩̭͓̰̤̲̫̟̜͔͕̞̘̅̅͑̋̂͆̈́̀͊̑͜͠į̵̨̧̢̧̣̥̻̟̩̞͈̠̠̝̦̜̯̀̓̆̿̌ṋ̸̖͖̗̠̳͙̪̙̱̙̼̺͂̀̽͐̂͐͆͛͊̚͘͠͝b̵̡̨̨͔͙̩̭̺̗̰̜̩̟͔̠̺̤̘̮͈͉͂̈́ͅͅȃ̴̡̡̧̨̡͍̲̹̻͙̘̰̯͙͇̩̯ͅc̵̥͎͇͙̦̺̭̘̥̒̃͒̍̃̉̂̌͆͑̎̈͋̀̓̉̓͘͜͝h̴̨̧̧̺̩̦̘̘̭̪̘̥̖̝͙̞̹̑̈́̾͠ͅ - and attacked it with all the claws and teeth the Malice inside him could conjure up. He would NOT suffer his friends hurt! He would NOT be used by another for their own evil goals! He didn’t blame the ghost - the geas was clear and powerful and had had centuries to sink in - but the person holding that leash was **not** going to make him hurt his friends.

Tag had a single instant to see the trapped spirit’s pained face just in front of his own before the world became noise and F̶̢̧̡̢̢̛̘̟̞̩̭͓̰̤̲̫̟̜͔͕̞̘̅̅͑̋̂͆̈́̀͊̑͜͠į̵̨̧̢̧̣̥̻̟̩̞͈̠̠̝̦̜̯̀̓̆̿̌ṋ̸̖͖̗̠̳͙̪̙̱̙̼̺͂̀̽͐̂͐͆͛͊̚͘͠͝b̵̡̨̨͔͙̩̭̺̗̰̜̩̟͔̠̺̤̘̮͈͉͂̈́ͅͅȃ̴̡̡̧̨̡͍̲̹̻͙̘̰̯͙͇̩̯ͅc̵̥͎͇͙̦̺̭̘̥̒̃͒̍̃̉̂̌͆͑̎̈͋̀̓̉̓͘͜͝h̴̨̧̧̺̩̦̘̘̭̪̘̥̖̝͙̞̹̑̈́̾͠ͅ was no more.


End file.
